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It’s not because I want to back the little guy over a US$2 billion company Read this edition online Tuesday, 29 March 2022 A weekly newsletter about the biggest changes in commerce—focusing on shifts that matter to you.

Will the war in Ukraine finally unite it?

Language runtimes are fun again. Where can a language run? It's not a question of Linux vs. Windows anymore. Can it run in the browser (WebAssembly)? Can it run in the kernel (BPF)? Does it support x86 and ARM? Can you embed it in another language? Other important questions: How can it be packed into a container? What security boundaries does the runtime provide? First, what is a language runtime? You can think of the language runtime as the environment in which a program is executed. Everyth

In Linux, virtual memory is divided into user space and kernel space. The kernel is the core part of the operating system that serves as the interface between physical hardware devices and running processes. Kernel space protects that interface from faults (if the operating system itself fails, how does it recover?) and from malicious programs (trying to circumvent operating system security or modify another program). A diagram of Linux kernel space and user space from Wikipedia (source [https:

In the increasingly centralized world of web3, are there any benefits to using a blockchain? What would crypto look like without the blockchain? There are fundamental tradeoffs to using a blockchain architecture (see Blockchain tradeoffs). Blockchains choose transparency over privacy and decentralization over scalability. Decentralization is costly. For example, permissionless blockchains must deal with bad actors and spammers. A centralized service like Gmail can detect and eliminate spam by

It seems like SQLite has shown up in more places everywhere you look. SQLite is an implementation of a SQL database engine as a C-language library. That means SQLite can be embedded into binaries, run in the browser, on edge devices, or anywhere else. * I'm all-in on server-side SQLite (5-9-22) * JSON and Virtual Columns in SQLite * Wp-SQLite: WordPress running on an SQLite database * Sqldiff: SQLite Database Difference Utility * High-Availability SQLite * Ask HN: Have you used SQLite as

Every year, Datadog analyzes anonymized data from its platform. Datadog's wide variety of customers and breadth within a company's infrastructure make the insights interesting. For example, this year, they looked at serverless adoption. You can read the full report here. Serverless has gone from a punchline "there are still servers in serverless" to a generally accepted fact of infrastructure. As cloud matures and the "knobs" become more apparent, the distinction between serverless vs. not is.

This article is a chapter from my new book Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 . The first releas...

I lived in NYC for six years. I probably spent 1 minute/day on and waiting for elevators during that time. Spending at least 1.5 days of your life with elevators, one can't help to think about what they are doing. Hard disk-seeking algorithms influenced many elevator algorithms (or maybe the other way around?). One way to think about it: hard disks need to read ("pick up") and write ("drop off") requests at different locations on the disk ("floors"). Here are some elevator algorithms, starting

There are two ways to build a PaaS. I'll call them top-down or bottoms-up1. Top-down PaaS are framework and language-specific – think NextJS on Vercel (or SpringBoot for the old-timers). They are highly opinionated – choosing NextJS means choosing React, single page application, and Node.js. Bottom-up PaaS look a lot more like IaaS. For example, there are PaaS built on Kubernetes, like Kubeflow, Knative, or OpenShift. These layers hope to be building blocks of bundled and abstracted IaaS. It'

Many of the DevOps themes I write about (monorepos, package managers, WebAssembly, Docker, etc.) have something to do with sharing code. Programs today are often a Frankenstein combination of different open-source libraries. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to manage all of the dependencies (see Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming [https://matt-rickard.com/reflections-on-10-000-hours-of-programming/]). How code gets used and reused should be important for developer productivi

This week has been difficult. I won’t weigh in on what happened in Texas other than this: What Steve Kerr said. There are, however, things to be positive about. U.S. colleges are graduating millions of young people who will soon enter the real world and deploy their talents. This time last year I wrote some […]

We dug into the data on B2B SaaS purchasing to see what’s really going on.

We’ve entered into a period of extreme uncertainty. While it’s impossible to forecast what will happen, Jason Green and Jake Saper share why Emergence looks to previous system shocks to see how the enterprise cloud sector might be affected.

Sean Fanning of OpenView discusses the implications of public market volatility on the software business.

Work has been the most important thing in my life. It’s my identity, and has been the greatest source of reward. Yes, my kids mean more to me now. But, for 35 years, the majority of my waking hours, effort, skills, and even relationships have been focused on work. Is that dysfunctional, or American? The […]

With the Great Exuberance behind us and more restructuring pain ahead of us, it’s clear that we’re back to the standard Rule of 40 in startup land. For several years, it was growth at all costs. Wa…

The different approaches companies are taking to compensation in a remote world

The pandemic may be over, but so is tech exuberance.

What do these have in common: Elon’s Twitter, ants, General von Moltke’s strategy, brains, AI, prediction markets, and Wikipedia? The answer shows the path to the future of democracy.

How companies that are successful end up creating new roles and job categories either directly or indirectly

We tear down the deck Lumigo used to land a $29 million Series A round led by Redline Capital last year.

Problem: Manually managing and configuring servers is a pain in the butt. Solution: Manage and provision servers via configuration or code files.

In World War II, the US Military examined damaged aircraft and concluded that they should add armor in the most-hit areas of the plane. Abraham Wald at Columbia University proved this was the wrong conclusion, that instead, adding armor to the least hit areas of the aircraft is more effective. Wald reasoned that the military was only considering aircraft that had survived the missions; any shot-down or destroyed aircraft wasn't available to be studied. Survivorship bias is where we only conside

Plus! Cash as Cosmetics; Two Inflations; AI; Offline-to-Online; Starlink; Diff Jobs ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌Open in browserThe Diffhow social platforms try to control the rate of fame and attention inflationlook at how YouTube's business model has evolved over timethe many levels at which a company can be a search business

Plus! What's Still Fundable (Con't.); ESG and Measurement; Sentiment Tracking; Volatility; Diff Jobs ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌Open in browserThe Diffa look at how to value an individual railroad businesslast Monday's post on the wonders of the railroad industrywhether technical debt explains the slow growth of worker productivity after the introduction of computersa profile of Membership Collective, a company that converts real estate into recurring revenue by selling exclusivity

"trying to listen to the horribly distorted jazz"

"documentaries about other psychopaths and dirtbags"